It was the very model of a modern mass
transit system. Its routes were laid out in a spoke and hub pattern
so that all parts of the geographical area served were accessible
from any other part. The equipment was the very latest electric powered
buses, trundling along their routes with little noise and no pollution.
It was the Green Line Bus Company and it served northern Kentucky
during the 1950’s. If you lived on the fringes of the known
world in places like Edgewood and Bromley and couldn’t drive,
it was your link to civilization.
The hub was actually in Cincinnati in
the Dixie Terminal Building at the corner of Walnut and 4th Streets.
It lay at the north end of the Suspension Bridge. Buses would cross
the bridge and go up a ramp into the Dixie Terminal Building. There
were two ramps and two big doors where the buses would enter and exit
the building. Between the doors was a U-shaped driveway where the
buses would stop upon entering the building to discharge their passengers.
The buses would then proceed around the loop to the far side where
they would load with passengers heading into Kentucky.
There was room inside the terminal for
a half dozen buses at a time. Each route had its designated space
for picking up passengers so the passengers would know exactly where
to stand and wait for their bus. I don’t know who choreographed
the ballet, but the buses always came in and left in the correct order
so that no bus held up another.
As you exited the big green bus on arriving
in the building you would pass through a turnstile into an indoor
shopping mall and up some steps to street level. We didn’t know
it was a mall in those days. The term hadn’t been coined yet,
but in walking the grand tile lined hallway to the exit doors you
would pass numerous small shops including one of our favorites, Klosterman’s
bakery. As you exited the building you could turn left and proceed
west on 4th Street to the McAlpins and Pogue’s department stores.
If instead you walked north on Walnut St. you would pass the entrance
to the Netherland Hilton hotel and Strauss’s Tobacco Shop, another
favorite haunt of mine back in my pipe smoking days..
At 5th and Walnut there was a big open
square just east of Fountain Square. This open square was the hub
for the Cincinnati transit system. Here you would find dozens of the
orange and cream colored buses waiting for passengers to transport
to the furthest reaches of the Queen City of the West. So with only
the effort of walking a block you could ride buses from Elsmere, Kentucky
to Sharonville, Ohio and all points in between.
The Green Line originally ran street cars.
These were train-like conveyances that ran on steel wheels running
on steel rails imbedded in the pavement along its route. These cars
had been discontinued sometime before I started riding the bus. The
steel rails were ripped up, probably during WW-II when steel was scarce,
and the resulting ditch was filled in with concrete. I still remember
the narrow concrete parallel paths in the otherwise brick pavement
of Oak Street in Ludlow. In the early 50’s Cincinnati still
had a few routes running with street cars.
On the Green Line the street cars were
replaced by electric buses. Like the street cars, they drew power
for their electric motors from overhead wires. Wherever the buses
ran there would be a pair of wires suspended about eighteen inches
apart over the path of the buses. Each bus would have two long poles
on its roof that sloped toward the rear, overhanging the back of the
bus. These would be spring-loaded so that they would be forced upward
to make contact with the two overhead wires. There was a rope attached
to the end of each pole and this rope was attached to a bell-shaped
rope automatic rewinding hub on the back of the bus. The rope would
let the driver reposition the poles should they jump off the wire
or if some hooligan would steal up behind the bus and pull the rope
and dislodge the poles from the wire. I can’t imagine who would
do such a thing but it must have been fun to see the bus come to a
sudden stop and the fuming driver get out to reposition the poles
on the wire.
In the mid-fifties, the Green Line proudly
trumpeted that they were modernizing their line by replacing all the
electric buses with modern diesel powered buses. They didn’t
mention that the new modern buses would be stinky and noisy. In the
era of diesel buses the fumes inside the Dixie Terminal bus area were
so thick that it took most of the ride home to get the stink out of
your nose.
The line that I rode most often was the
No. 3 Ludlow-Bromley line. If I was coming from Dixie Heights I would
ride the Erlanger-Elsmere or Garvey Avenue bus to Covington. In exiting
the bus, I would ask for a “transfer.” A transfer was
a little slip of colored paper that looked a lot like the play money
from the popular Monopoly game. There was some code to the color that
prevented you from abusing the transfer privilege. Anyway, I could
take my transfer and hand it to the driver of the Ludlow-Bromley bus
and continue my trip without having to pay any additional fee. I don’t
remember the fare but it was ten or fifteen cents, maybe rising to
a whole quarter by the end of the decade.
I would wait for the Ludlow-Bromley bus
at the northwest corner of 4th & Madison in Covington. The buses
seemed to run about every twenty minutes so the wait was never long
although it seemed interminable on cold winter days when the icy wind
whipped down the canyons of brick along 4th street, swirling the snow
flakes around your feet. The bus would continue along 4th street to
its end then turn right and go down to the flood-wall and then alongside
the river to West Covington where it turned up the hill and over the
ridge to Ludlow. It would go along Elm St. through the main business
district of Ludlow, turning left at the high school to go up to Oak
St. It would follow Oak St. over the dam that created The Lagoon and
on into Bromley. At Bromley Elementary it would turn up the hill (a
favorite spot for pulling the poles off the wire), go around the block
and then wait diagonally across the street from the pharmacy for the
departure time for its return trip east on Oak St.
The line that went out towards South Ft.
Mitchell was originally the Dixie Traction Company and they ran electric
street cars all the way to the intersection of Buttermilk Pike and
Dixie Highway. The street cars couldn’t handle the steep grade
of the Dixie Highway so they wound up the hill in a circuitous path
that led through Park Hills and Devou Park. That route was discontinued
before I started riding that bus but Judy remembers it well. (She
is somewhat older than me.) By the time I started riding, they had
converted to diesel powered buses that ran out Pike Street and up
Dixie Highway all the way to Garvey Avenue in Elsmere. The whole trip
from Dixie Heights HS to Bromley took about an hour.
The only other line that I rode was the
Rosedale line that ran out through Covington to the Rosedale Swimming
Pool. It was the only large public swimming pool in Northern Kentucky
and we made the trek out there several times a summer to get our fingers
turned all wrinkly and prune-like and our backs burned to a bright
red. Usually, it would take several hours of lying with our heads
on a pillow to get all the water out of our ears and about a week
for our backs to stop peeling and return to their normal white. Tanning
was not something that ever happened to me to any great degree.
My only times when I regularly rode the
buses was when I had to stay after school for music lessons or band
rehearsals or a football game and when I had a summer job in Cincinnati
during the summers of 1959 and 1960. I don’t remember many noteworthy
events that occurred during my journeys home from school. One night
I was riding home from a football game. The bus was an island of light
cruising along the darkened streets of Covington and Ludlow. A young
couple got on holding hands and very much interested in each other.
The girl was Carol T., a classmate and sweetheart of mine when we
were in the sixth grade together at Ludlow Elementary. She didn’t
recognize me and I didn’t want to interrupt their mutual concentration
on each other. It was a moment of nostalgia, very unusual in one so
young.
When I was working in Cincinnati at Fas
Foto, Inc. I had a free ride to work each morning if I was waiting
by my boss’s car when he came out of the house. Bob would drive
to work through the morning rush hour, entertaining me with tips on
driving in rush-hour traffic and his days in the CCC before WW-II.
He would usually work late each evening so after I punched out at
the time-clock, I would cross Montgomery Rd. and catch one of the
cream and orange Cincinnati Traction buses that carried me back downtown.
A brisk walk to the Dixie Terminal Building
and polite jockeying for position at the spot where the No. 3 Ludlow-Bromley
bus would stop, followed. It was very important to be one of the first
to get on the bus because that meant you got to sit next to one of
the open windows where you could get a little relief from the summer
heat and the nearness of your fellow riders. If you were late in boarding
the bus it usually meant you had to cling to a pole or overhead rail
while the bus swayed to and fro on its appointed rounds. On busy trips
this would be a full body contact sport. In those days before air
conditioning that was not always a pleasant experience.
Stories
of Kenton County Residents